Month: January 2015

Unbelievable? How could Mary Landrieu lose? I thought she had the keg stand frat boy bloc locked up. #LASen pic.twitter.com/wtfypwQ6z2

— Srcih Lelrim (@ChrisAMillerNow) December 7, 2014

There’s been a growing chorus of bloggers arguing that an approach to lowering sexual assault on campus shouldn’t just target frats, but also empower sororities – to throw their own parties. Anna Merlan is onboard:

The advantages are pretty clear: the sorority would have a far greater ability to control the alcohol, including keeping an eye on what’s in the mixed drinks. And they’d be able to control who enters the house, as at Sigma Delta, who also appoint sober monitors to keep an eye on the scene. And many, many other people have made that argument from every side of the political spectrum: Robby Soave at the Libertarian magazine Reason, sociology professor Michael Kimmel writing for TIME , Charlottesville’s alt-weekly C-Ville. … Plus, the greatest benefit of all to having a party in your own house: at any point, you can lock your door, put on your pajamas, fire up Netflix and cease all social interaction, the best part of any night out.

Juliet Lapidos also sees sorority parties as a good path: “Telling fraternities not to throw parties is overbearing; telling undergraduates not to attend frat parties won’t work; and telling undergraduates to control their drinking at frat parties probably won’t work, either.” So what’s getting in the way?

As The Times’s Alan Schwarz explained on Monday, most national Greek-letter sororities do not throw keggers. They are, in fact, barred from serving alcohol at their residences. Julie Johnson, an officer at the National Panhellenic Conference, said in an interview that the point of the ban was to “ensure safety” as well as compliance with drinking-age laws. She also said she did not foresee the rule “changing anywhere in the near future.”

But Amanda Hess counters:

For the national organizations and local chapters, banning alcohol is a financial calculation, not a moral one:

staying dry helps them to avoid the legal liabilities shouldered by raucous fraternities. Drinking contributes not just to campus rape but also to physical fights, accidents, poisoning, and other destructive behaviors. James R. Favor & Company, an insurance company that covers more than a dozen fraternities, told the Times in 2012 that one national fraternity was paying an average of $812,951 in annual settlements until it went dry, at which point its annual payout dropped to $15,388. An officer with the National Panhellenic Conference told the Times that “she preferred to preserve the relative calm of sorority houses, and continue to let fraternities assume the cost, risk and cleanup of house parties.”

Jenny Kutner, on the other hand, doesn’t think sorority parties would make any difference:

[I]t simply fails to address the problems at the root of the campus rape crisis: binge-drinking and lack of education (about healthy alcohol consumption and sexual consent). But what also goes unaddressed are the perceptions of rape culture as a “so-called rape culture,” as the Cornell student described to the Times. The problematic attitude toward partying and sexual assault that persists on many campuses is embodied in Williams’ words — specifically, in the failure to question why any woman should ever have to “wonder how to get out” of somewhere she doesn’t want to be. So long as attitudes such as Williams’ remain, it’s unlikely that shifting a perilous party culture from one house to another will do much to increase women’s safety.

But there’s also the question of how much sororities really will do to protect their own. While anecdotal evidence might indicate that the organizations will go further to protect the interests of individual members, sororities are businesses — just like fraternities, institutions that have been repeatedly charged with protecting their own best interests when accidents happen.

Robby Soave likes the idea of sorority parties but acknowledges that “there’s always the risk that moving the party into the sorority will have a corrupting effect on the girls, rather than a civilizing effect on the scene.” Olga Khazan elaborates:

[Sorority parties] could further the flawed assumption that women are the more dutiful sex; that we are naturally better at policing inappropriate behavior. The Responsible-Lady-Fixes-Everything paradigm is why we have TV commercials where a size-two mom cheerily Lysols every inch of the house while her gross husband watches TV. (Or, more generally, the thinking that women do more chores because they like things cleaner.)

This reasoning is evident in how some of the Times‘ sources explained why they don’t think sorority sisters should have parties: “Mr. Pendleton said that because sororities tended to be smaller and more intimately decorated, members should hold events with alcohol at outside venues like dance halls.” You see, the women’s intricate doilies and knick-knacks simply will not withstand the constant, salty spray of a “Natty Boh” keg.

Meanwhile, on the fraternity front:

Last week, just in time for the start of rush, University of Virginia fraternities signed a new set of rules intended to prevent excessive drinking as well as sexual assault at frat parties. The new rules prohibit punch and kegs (beer must now be served in cans; liquor, by a licensed bartender) and require that parties be supervised by sober fraternity members, which seems like a step in the right direction.

Douthat imagines how the left and right will respond to the president:

[Obama’s] influence over Clinton’s campaign will depend on economic trends and foreign policy developments as well as her own choices: If he’s climbed to a 47-48 percent approval rating by early 2016, I wouldn’t expect there to be any daylight between his agenda and her platform; if he falls back toward 40 percent (or drops below) amid some unlooked-for crisis, then no presidential speech is likely to constrain Hillary from trying to charting a more post-Obama course.

Meanwhile, the future relevance of his stab at a middle class agenda will be determined in part by whatever the G.O.P. comes up with for its post-Obama blueprint. If you contrast what was on offer last night with some of the ideas that, say, Utah Senator Mike Lee has proposed, there’s a very interesting right-left debate to be had around higher education reform, tax reform (family-friendly and otherwise), and other issues as well. But maybe the eventual Republican nominee will have a very different game plan, and the big clashes will end up happening elsewhere. Or maybe the mere fact that Obama has touched these issues will prompt the right to retreat to “safer” (that is, staler) ground.

Joe Klein appreciates Obama’s political deftness:

There were twin sources of the white flight from the Democratic party. One was the sense that Democrats were only interested in taking money from people like the Erlers and giving it to deadbeats, or feeding the government bureaucracy, personified by the post office stereotype: slow-moving, sullen, entitled. The other was a matter of values: the Democrats were the counterculture party, an argument that is evaporating as the culture has moved on, accepting homosexuality, premarital sex and, soon, marijuana. The first argument remains strong, though. It was what propelled the Republican victory in 2014. Obamacare was perceived as classic “liberalism”—it took money from hard-working Americans and gave it to unhealthy deadbeats. Only it didn’t: it gave subsidies to the working poor; the indigent were already covered by Medicaid.

The striking thing about Obama’s latest round of proposals is how targeted they are: the centerpiece tax reforms take money from the wealthy and give it to middle-class taxpayers, people like the Erlers. You have to actually pay taxes to benefit from tax credits (except for the child care deduction, which becomes a stipend for those who don’t). Even his free community college proposal might have been a boon to Rebekah, as she struggled to learn accounting. This is quite the opposite of offering health insurance to a country that was already 85% covered. It is middle-class populism: money is taken from the wealthy and given to a broad swath of the population whose incomes have been stagnating for 30 years.

Alec MacGillis feels that Obama has called “the bluff of the Republicans now claiming the mantle of inequality warriors”:

The [Obama tax] proposal has led them into a political trap, prompting them into an instinctual, reflexive defense of the wealthiest Americans. And it has thereby clarified the discussions to come on the campaign trail over the next year and a half. Talk all you want about restoring shared prosperity, Obama is saying, but this is the kind of reform it will take to bring balance to an economy that has gotten so top-heavy and out of whack. The proposal will implicitly admonish not only Republicans but also Hillary Clinton, should her own Wall Street sympathies and upper-bracket aspirations keep her from adopting an aggressive platform to tackle inequality.

And Beinart detects a “fracturing of the GOP message”:

Mike Huckabee looks determined to run on cultural decline. Jeb Bush and even Mitt Romney want to focus on using government to help the poor. Every potential candidate except Rand Paul will likely promise defense hikes and a more aggressive, militaristic foreign policy. And every potential GOP candidate, including Rand Paul, will likely unveil a big tax cut, probably unmatched by real reductions in spending.

A reader quotes Byron York from this post:

Indeed, it’s widely conceded that part of the reason the unemployment rate has fallen is because a core of discouraged workers dropped out of the job search altogether. So for many listeners, Obama’s “turn the page” declaration will seem as out of touch as his claim that Islamic State’s advance has been stopped.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has multiple ratings for measuring unemployment. The official rating is the U3 rating, which is currently 5.6%. It was 7.8% when Obama took office and reached 10.0% at the height of the recession. It has always been the rating everyone references, but now that the economy is recovering, the Obama haters want to throw out an asterisk.

What York describes is measured by the U4 rating.

The U4 measures the U3 plus those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no work is available for them. That number is currently at 6%. It was 8.3% when Obama took office and reached 10.6% during the height of the recession.

Finally, there is another rating, the U6 rating. The U6 is probably the most accurate measurement of unemployment. It is a combination of all ratings plus part-time workers who wish to be full-time. That number is currently 11.2%. It was 14.2% when Obama took office and reached 17.1% during the height of the recession.

Under the Obama administration, every rating of unemployment is better than it was when he inherited an economy hemorrhaging jobs.  To say that the economy turned the page isn’t out of touch; it’s factual. To be out of touch is to want to go back to the incompetence of the Bush administration. He inherited a U3 of 4%, a U4 of 4.2%, and a U6 of 7.1% and managed to double unemployment.

(Chart, and all the aforementioned stats, from Portal Seven, sourced from the Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Update from a reader, who counterbalances the previous one:

Your reader who discusses alternative measures of unemployment – U3, U4, U6 – misses something important: people who have not looked for work in the last 12 months are NOT counted in ANY of these measures.

U6 includes all “marginally attached workers.” “Discouraged workers” are a subset of the “marginally attached.” “Marginally attached” have not looked for work in the past four weeks, but HAVE looked for work in the last 12 months.

So if you have not looked for work in the last 12 months, you’re not even “marginally attached,” which means you’re not counted in ANY of U3, U4, U5, or U6. The BLS is not “cooking the books,” as the right-wing conspiracy theorists routinely assert. Instead the BLS is using statistical formulations designed to convey useful data in normal times – but these simply aren’t normal times.

The key to sorting out the lies from the damn lies from the statistics is this:

Yes, there are more jobs now than there were when Obama took office. But the jobs growth has not nearly caught up with the population growth since January 2009. Thus there are more jobs, but not nearly enough jobs to employ the same % of the population. (Graph, and explanation, here.) Thus the labor force participation rate has dropped. That’s the real upshot of the graph, and that’s what the BLS unemployment measures don’t capture.

If you Google “long term unemployed” you’ll find that they form a historically high share of the unemployed. But it’s not clear these articles are really catching the full extent of the problem -because it’s not clear whether they’re starting with the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures of unemployment, like your reader. Any discussion that starts with the various BLS categories is missing those who haven’t looked for work in the last 12 months. For those, you have to look at the labor force participation rate – which remains historically low, and shows no sign of improving.

The aging of the Baby Boomers accounts for about 40% to 50% of the drop in the labor force participation rate (links here, here, and here). The most likely reason for the other 50% to 60% of the decline: lack of work.

Finally, simple supply and demand. If a significant number of people were dropping out of the labor force for ANY reason other than lack of work, then we’d see wages rising significantly. But inflation-adjusted wages remain flat to barely growing.

That’s why people are unhappy: wages are flat and there’s still not enough work to go around. The relatively good BLS unemployment statistics can’t change this.

That’s the argument of Robert Howse’s recent book, which portrays the controversial philosopher as something of a liberal internationalist rather than the progenitor of warmongering neoconservatism. Samuel Goldman isn’t so sure; he claims Howse should have included “a detailed consideration of the role of Zionism in Strauss’s thought about violence”:

In his intellectual autobiography, Strauss describes his earliest political decision as a commitment to “simple, straightforward political Zionism” at the age of 17.

Throughout the 1920s, he was active in the Revisionist movement led by Vladimir Jabotinsky. In the 1930s, Strauss endorsed the “the principles of the Right, fascist, authoritarian, imperialist principles…” as the only basis for defense of Germany’s Jews. In the 1940s, he offered a moral defense of the British Empire partly because of the mercy it offered to the vanquished—including the Jews settled in Palestine. In the 1950s and 1960s, Strauss lectured and wrote extensively on Jewish themes, rarely failing to voice his admiration and gratitude for the foundation of the State of Israel.

These facts are barely mentioned in Leo Strauss: Man of Peace. In fact, the only explicit reference to the State of Israel that I have found comes in the conclusion, when Howse mentions Strauss’s 1957 letter to National Review defending Israel from accusations of racism. As part of his polemic against the neoconservative appropriation of Strauss, Howse assures readers that, “This was an act of loyalty to the Jewish people, not to the political right.”

Howse may be correct about Strauss’s intentions. But Strauss’s personal relationship to the American conservative movement is not the most important issue. Strauss’s lifelong commitment to Zionism tells us something important about his views on political violence. In this decisive case, he endorsed the politics of national self-assertion that Howse contends he had rejected by end of his career.